Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

first-class matches between 1870 and 1882. He had helped form the Leicester Cricket Association in 1873 and been the original vice-president of the county club in 1879, playing for the side for many years, together with two of his brothers, captaining it for six years and scoring its first-ever century, in 1883 against MCC at Lord’s. It was during this period, while he was playing for Lutterworth, that King became connected with the county club, for whom crucially Charles Marriott still occasionally played and whose president he was from 1890 to 1893. King was expected to join his father’s building firm, but cricket’s lure proved too strong, and instead of putting his eye to the plumb-line he would keep it on a ball; for during the summers he practised and received coaching at the County Ground, going the dozen or so miles in each direction on foot, but with a ball in hand to improve his catching and while away the tedium of an oft-repeated journey. Then ‘one fine day’, as ‘Reynard’ recalled years later in the Leicester Daily Mercury , ‘some deliveries he sent along to Dick Pougher so impressed the renowned player that he recommended him to the County Committee’. Early Days 17 Three of the leading figures in nineteenth-century cricket in Lutterworth. Left to right: Rev Edward Elmhirst, Rev William Townshend, Charles Marriott.